'I'm the guy running for president, not him'

By ALEXANDER BURNS

09/24/2012 12:04 PM EDT

Back when Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, I drew some strong objections from Romney-world for writing that the presidential candidate had stopped well short of embracing the Ryan budget. The idea was that Romney wanted to be seen as bold by naming Ryan to the ticket, without actually going as far as the Wisconsin congressman in laying out bright-line fiscal reform proposals.

That's no longer a controversial assessment of the Romney-Ryan dynamic, and I can't help noting that Romney validated the main point in his "60 Minutes" interview last night. Here's Romney's exchange with Scott Pelley on the $716 billion in Medicare cost reductions the Obama administration enacted through the national health care law:

ROMNEY: He was going to use that money to reduce the budget deficit. I’m putting it back into the Medicare and I’m the guy running for president, not him. So what I do in my Medicare plan for younger people coming along is say this: we’re going to have higher benefits for low-income people and lower benefits for high-income people. We’re going to make it more means-tested. I think if you do that we’ll make sure to preserve Medicare into the indefinite future.

Emphasis mine. It's pretty much conventional wisdom at this point that Romney is still running a pre-Ryan campaign. Given that Paul Ryan is a national figure because of his budget ideas, it's a puzzling political choice for Romney to make him the VP candidate while continuing to hold some of those ideas at arm's length.